Elon Musk’s xAI launches Grok 4 alongside a $300 month-to-month subscription | TechCrunch

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Elon Musk’s AI firm, xAI, late on Wednesday launched its newest flagship AI mannequin, Grok 4, and unveiled a brand new $300-per-month AI subscription plan, SuperGrok Heavy.

Grok is xAI’s reply to fashions like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and might analyze photos and reply to questions. In latest months, Grok has develop into extra deeply built-in into Musk’s social community, X, which was just lately acquired by xAI. Nevertheless, that has additionally put Grok’s misbehavior entrance and heart for tens of millions of customers.

The expectations are excessive for Grok 4. The most recent AI mannequin from xAI can be stacked up towards OpenAI’s forthcoming AI mannequin, GPT-5, which is predicted to launch later this summer season.

“With respect to academic questions, Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions,” mentioned Elon Musk throughout a livestream Wednesday night time. “At times, it may lack common sense, and it has not yet invented new technologies or discovered new physics, but that is just a matter of time.”

Musk wore a leather-based jacket and sat apart from xAI leaders to launch Grok 4 (Credit score: xAI)

The launch of Grok 4 comes amid a tumultuous week for Elon Musk’s firms. Earlier on Wednesday, Linda Yaccarino stepped down from her position because the CEO of X after roughly two years with the corporate. X has but to announce her successor.

Yaccarino’s departure comes simply days after Grok’s official, automated X account responded to customers with antisemitic feedback criticizing Hollywood’s “Jewish executives” and praising Hitler. xAI needed to briefly restrict Grok’s account and delete the offensive posts. In response to the incident, xAI appeared to have eliminated a just lately added part from Grok’s public system immediate, a listing of directions for the AI chatbot to comply with, that advised it to not draw back from making “politically incorrect” claims.

Musk and xAI’s leaders largely prevented discussing the incident, as an alternative specializing in Grok 4’s efficiency and capabilities.

xAI launched two fashions on Wednesday: Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy — the latter being the corporate’s “multi-agent version” that gives elevated efficiency. Musk claimed that Grok 4 Heavy spawns a number of brokers to work on an issue concurrently, after which all of them evaluate their work “like a study group” to seek out the perfect reply.

xAI claims that Grok 4 reveals frontier degree efficiency on a number of benchmarks, together with Humanity’s Final Examination— a difficult take a look at measuring AI’s capability to reply hundreds of crowdsourced questions on topics like math, humanities, and pure science. In line with xAI, Grok 4 scored 25.4% on Humanity’s Final Examination with out “tools,” outperforming Google’s Gemini 2.5 Professional, which scored 21.6%, and OpenAI’s o3 (excessive), which scored 21%.

xAI claims that Grok 4 Heavy, with “tools,” was in a position to obtain a rating of 44.4%, outperforming Gemini 2.5 Professional with instruments, which scored 26.9%.

The nonprofit Arc Prize says that Grok achieves a brand new state-of-the-art rating on its ARC-AGI-2 take a look at — one other tough benchmark that consists of puzzle-like issues the place an AI has to determine visible patterns — scoring 16.2%. That’s almost twice the rating of the subsequent finest business AI mannequin, Claude Opus 4.

Screenshot 2025 07 09 at 9.34.45PM
Grok 4’s efficiency on a number of tutorial benchmarks (Credit score: xAI)

Alongside Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, xAI launched its costliest AI subscription plan but, a $300-per-month subscription referred to as SuperGrok Heavy. Subscribers to the plan will get an early preview to Grok 4 Heavy, in addition to early entry to new options. The plan is much like ultra-premium tiers supplied by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, however xAI now provides the most costly subscription amongst main AI suppliers.

SuperGrok Heavy subscribers could get early entry to some new merchandise xAI plans to launch within the coming months. The corporate mentioned Wednesday that an AI coding mannequin is coming in August, a multi-modal agent in September, and a video technology mannequin in October.

xAI is releasing Grok 4 by means of its API in an effort to get builders to construct functions with the mannequin. The corporate notes that xAI’s enterprise sector is simply two months outdated, nonetheless, it plans to work with hyperscalers to make Grok obtainable by means of their cloud platforms.

Regardless of Grok’s frontier-level efficiency on benchmarks, it might show tough for xAI to maneuver previous its latest mishaps because it tries to pitch Grok to companies as an actual contender to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Whether or not companies are able to undertake Grok, flaws and all, stays to be seen.

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